Charting a Path From Googly Eyes to Fantasia

Ellen Gallagher Gets a Retrospective at the New Museum

Watery abstraction: “Osedax,” a 2010 film installation by Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne, in a Gallagher retrospective at the New Museum.Credit
Linda Rosier for The New York Times

In our globalized art world, simultaneous museum solos in multiple cities are becoming a new paradigm. This might be fine if you’re, say, James Turrell, but it can be awkward for a midcareer artist. A case in point is “Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me,” a piecey two-floor display at the New Museum that coincides with a big retrospective at the Tate Modern in London.

Ms. Gallagher, 47, emerged in the early 1990s with memorable paintings that yoked Minimalism to, of all things, minstrelsy, by scattering tiny caricatures of eyes and mouths across creamy expanses of paper and canvas. More recently the artist has branched out from painting and collage to film, and from pop-culture imagery to literary and science-fiction references, as exemplified by her last couple of shows at Gagosian. (One was inspired by a chapter from “Moby-Dick”; another included an installation about alien life forms.) At its best, her work has a political thrust that is enlivened by tactile details and pits monotony against whimsy, as when she embellishes grids of vintage beauty advertisements with pairs of googly eyes and thick globs of Plasticine clay.

Her strengths, however, are not much in evidence in the exhibition at the New Museum. It’s small (just 41 works) but probably should have been more selective, given that the much larger Tate show has absorbed many of Ms. Gallagher’s most important paintings, films and works on paper. (The two shows were organized separately; the New Museum’s was assembled by the curator Gary Carrion-Murayari.)

Part of the problem is that it’s structured like a dumbbell, with lots of old and very new works and not much in between to connect them. Those modified beauty ads are missing, for example, with the exception of two small collages (“Bouffant Pride” from 2003 and “Skinatural” from 1997).

The museum’s vertical layout doesn’t help. The early paintings and works on paper on the third floor are cut off from the underwater fantasia on the fourth, which is dominated by the 2010 film installation “Osedax” and feels like a separate project show.

In “Osedax,” made with the artist’s partner, Edgar Cleijne, visitors crouch to enter a black-box theater and settle in to view two simultaneous projections: one of glass slides hand-painted with watery abstractions, the other a 16-millimeter film incorporating footage of a shipwreck off the coast of Rhode Island. Jack Goldstein’s dreamy final film, “Underwater Sea Fantasy,” comes to mind, although Ms. Gallagher’s approach feels more scientific. (The osedax is a wormlike organism that feeds on whale carcasses.) It’s also distinguished by a funky soundtrack, “Message From a Black Man,” by the ’70s soul group the Whatnauts.

Surrounding the installation are new paintings of snaking vascular forms made by scraping away layers of pink and red paint and masking the surrounding areas with ink. They might be coral reefs or views of the osedax under a microscope, but Ms. Gallagher has left the forms open to multiple natural-history interpretations; in some you can make out the form of a black bird perching on a branch.

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These untitled works, all the same size and square in format, grab you at first but then fade into a kind of benign decoration. Technique is the most interesting thing about them; it suggests, among other things, that Ms. Gallagher has been looking closely at the peeled and incised collage-paintings of Mark Bradford.

She seems to have abandoned the rich science-fiction narratives that enlivened earlier works like the “Watery Ecstatic” series from 2001-5. These intricate incised-paper drawings, on view in a stairwell at the museum, posited the existence of an underwater kingdom called Drexciya, a “Black Atlantis” inhabited by slaves who died while being transported from Africa.

Fragments of other hybrid fantasy civilizations pop up on the third floor; the 2005 collage “Abu Simbel” drops the Afro-futurist musician Sun Ra and his spaceship into an ancient Egyptian site, while the large enameled paintings take their titles from Klee’s drawing “Dance You Monster” and their abstract imagery from the backgrounds of Krazy Kat comics.

Had the show focused solely on Ms. Gallagher’s retro-futuristic imaginings, it might have achieved some coherence; they are by far the most interesting part of the show. (A more tightly edited catalog essay might also have helped.) But the exhibition reaches all the way back to the artist’s breakout paintings of the 1990s, with their accumulations of beadlike eyes and lips on patchworks of lined paper. Though they are important, their regimented quality is at odds with the free-floating water worlds of the newer work.

You sense that those worlds could become even more immersive; the show’s curator tells us that Ms. Gallagher has a studio in the port city of Rotterdam and spent a college semester at sea studying oceanic microclimates.

Perhaps her future projects will delve deeper into this topic. And perhaps a single, focused exhibition, as opposed to dueling museum retrospectives, will give us a clearer picture of Ms. Gallagher’s accomplishments so far.

Correction: August 31, 2013

An art review on July 5 about “Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me,” an exhibition at the New Museum, misspelled the title of one work by Ms. Gallagher and misstated the year she painted it. It is “Skinatural,” from 1997; not “Skinnatural,” from 2007. A spokesman for the museum pointed out the error on Friday.